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European football governing body UEFA has threatened to go ahead with a boycott of FIFA events despite FIFA offering an apology over its handling of a proposed private investment plan.
In a statement on Thursday, UEFA said: “UEFA’s associations were very clear about the conditions attached to the non-participation in FIFA competitions.”
“First, the proposals to sell off the major competitions had to be withdrawn and secondly, assurances have to be made that such attempts to disfigure the game in this way will never be made again,” it continued, adding: “These conditions have not been met.”
On Wednesday, FIFA President Gianni Infantino and other senior FIFA figures gathered in Morocco for a crisis meeting to discuss the failed $20 billion FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) proposal and how the world governing body would move forward.
The plan, which would have invited third parties to take minority, non-controlling stakes in the FFE, a new subsidiary that would have run FIFA’s commercial and event operations, faced major pushback from across the football world, with UEFA announcing at the time that its 55 member associations would boycott FIFA competitions “for so long as these proposals remain alive.”
However, following the talks in Rabat, FIFA issued a statement saying that Infantino had the “full support” of its Secretary General Mattias Grafström and members of the FIFA management board.
FIFA also acknowledged that “mistakes” were made with regards to the FFE and said it had apologised to member associations.
Addressing the announcement on Thursday, UEFA said: “Yesterday’s announcement that some people employed by the FIFA President (and whose careers depend on his favour) agree with him changes nothing.”
FIFPRO, a global representative body for professional football players, also delivered a ferocious statement on the FFE and FIFA’s Morocco meeting on Thursday, saying the fiasco was “not merely a governance failure” but a “profound abuse of presidential power.”
“We have noted FIFA’s internal update from its meeting in Rabat, Morocco with deep concern,” it said. “Rather than confronting what happened, it reaffirms support for the organisation’s leadership while reducing a fundamental governance and constitutional failure to a matter of ‘processes and communications’ to be ‘improved'”.
